Certified Opinion Haver

What is the origin of this hatred toward the Russian peasantry, of this resentment of which Gorki makes himself the spokesman? He was certainly the spokesman of a certain current of opinion, otherwise it is hard to imagine him publishing such a manifesto in 1922. Of course, as we have seen, there were immediate class interests at stake: the status of the intellectual was bound up with the protection of a cultural heritage threatened by the masses; the struggle over supplies between city and countryside left deep scars and the seeds of mutual resentment. But one senses something older in this hatred, something that would have had time to take hold: the result of a long brooding suddenly sharpened by circumstances. Where does this hatred come from? I asked a Soviet historian. He rejects the term "hatred" — how could he not, given that Gorki remains an officially venerated author? — In his view, it reflects the turn taken by a great number of Russian intellectuals of his generation who, carried along by the "populist" current, went to preach socialism in the most remote parts of the countryside, were rather badly received, and returned filled with bitterness toward the peasantry.

Having witnessed comparable phenomena, I readily believe in this reversal. Passing from mystical adoration to disgust, so to speak without transition, is a natural movement of exaltation on the part of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie. In France, shortly before or after 1968, I saw young intellectuals "establish" themselves among the workers and enter the factory with the religious fervour of men to whom absolute truth was at last about to be revealed, only to later, after a difficult or failed experience, abandon the "establishment" declaring that the workers were irremediably embourgeoisés, even rotten or fascist. It is true that this was not how the majority of "established" workers felt or acted, but that talkative minority of embittered men fed an entire anti-worker ideology in certain currents after 1968. Others followed the same path "à l'économie," that is, without the physical setting of the establishment: they simply passed from a mystically pro-worker rhetoric to a pathologically anti-worker one. Having seen this in France leads me to believe that something similar could have occurred in Russia, following the return of intellectual missionaries disappointed by their rural experience. Gorki refers to the way Russian literature reflected the reversal:

"The literature of the friends of the people was in the service of political agitation and of peasant idealism. But at the end of the nineteenth century, literature's attitude toward the countryside and the peasant changed radically, becoming less self-pitying and more truthful. This new attitude was established by Anton Chekhov in his stories In the Ravine and The Peasants."

Gorki suggests that he himself had undergone a similar journey:

"But where is that kind and reflective Russian peasant, that tireless seeker of truth and justice, of whom nineteenth-century Russian literature spoke to the world in such beautiful and persuasive terms? In my youth, I persevered in my search for such a man in the villages of Russia, and I did not find him. What I did find was a harsh and severe realist."

The disillusionments of intellectual youth tend to be vengeful. Is there any hatred worse than the one that follows a disappointed love? The success or failure of the union between young intellectuals and the working and peasant masses is, in periods of revolutionary expansion, a complex but crucial question: if these forces fail to find common ground, if the ideology of the young intellectuals (who play an important role in the production of cultural objects and superstructures) forms itself in opposition to the diffuse ideology of the deeper forces of the people, a decisive union is undermined from the outset.

The failure, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the attempt to fuse — through "populism" — the ideology of the people with a part of the Russian intellectual youth and the peasantry led, in the short term, to expressions of despair and attempts at nihilism. In the long term, this failure secreted the poison of a fiercely anti-peasant ideology across broad sectors of the socialist intelligentsia and among many of those who would become cadres of the Revolution.

This ideological legacy was an important element in the general objective situation of the class struggle in Russia throughout the early years of the twentieth century. The line of a political party can change, the decisions of Soviet central power can shift within hours, but the fundamental attitudes of classes and social groups toward one another do not change overnight. The many-sided conflict between city and countryside, which was constant from the beginning of the Revolution, also bears this mark.

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/05/what_state_prisoners_get_to_wo.html

Instead of just commodity money (gold or silver), money today mostly takes the form of IOU claims on existing or (speculated) future wealth in products. Marx talks about this more in vol 2 and 3 of Capital. Rather than being a goldbug as some people assume he actually states repeatedly throughout all 3 volumes that he sees this speculative and symbolic money as the fulfillment of the function that commodity money was performing in the first place as the universal equivalent leveling all values into one measure and, in the form of price, a relative measure for the total value of all commodities.

Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky

Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*

You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

We know patriarchy and the family unit evolved as the vehicles of inheritance, maintaining class distinctions via the continuation of property ownership, but we live in a period where many, if not most, have less and less to inherit - current generations are worse off than their parents and grandparents, independent living is increasingly achieved not through marriage and home-ownership but through group renting, and certainly ever fewer people have any sort of economic property (tools, workable land etc) to inherit; and, inseparable from these facts, is the simple reality that raising a child is increasingly unaffordable.

What, then, is the material purpose of the family as traditionally defined? Capitalism digs its own grave and it buries itself piecemeal, it is a system built on foundations which its own existence steadily erodes, and this particular aspect seems to me to be approaching its obsolescence for all but the bourgeoisie.

It's no surprise that the reactionaries fighting tooth & nail to preserve and encourage the family form are usually wealthy, not just because the bourgeoisie generally benefit from reactionary positions of all stripes but because in this case they are the only ones left to benefit. Of course the wealthy want to promote the traditional family and encourage women to be their child-bearing domestic servants, their class position is partially dependent on having heirs! They need to perpetuate their class, maintain the division upon which their status rests, and that means maintaining the structure which preserves it at an individual level as well as societal. The conflation made by Andrew Tate and his ilk between extravagant wealth and domination of women is the same phenomenon, just appealing to a slightly different demographic.

Which is why in the context of US politics I am basically a reformist. I think maybe on a fifty year timescale, a real labor movement can be built around ideologically committed, democratic labor unions and something like the Meidner plan can be pulled off. Probably this has to be backed by some level of labor militancy because, per crisis bargaining theory, even peacetime negotiations resolve to outcomes that reflect the balance of military power. But I think if there comes a US transition to socialism it can probably only happen by system-internal means. Of course I could be totally wrong I'm not uh, I'm not the Oracle of Delphi.

yeah, i mean, i don't think most revolutionary marxists seriously believe that socialist revolution will be achieved through armed mass revolution in an otherwise peaceful and prosperous developed capitalist economy. that doesn't mean writing off the concept however--what you might call the 'orthodox marxist' position on this is that the existing political and economic system is unsustainable long-term, and conditions will inevitably deterioriate to a point where that rational calculation changes, and the chief purpose of revolutionary socialist organizing before that inflection point is to build a party that is embedded in the mass movement, in labour struggles, etc. that can at that point provide a critical driving and directing force.

From as soon as we learn to talk we're told our wants and opinions don't matter. When our self-expression is deemed off-limits, it's natural that food choices, experiences of pain & sickness, passions and aspirations cannot be our own either. Basic medical care is held over us in exchange for compliance. We're told our sicknesses aren't real. Exercise and fitness are used as a cudgel to coerce us into proving our masculinity. School sports and extracurricular sports are basically used as sexgendered hazing rituals, sexual & physical & medical abuse enforced by teachers, parents and same-age peers alike. Our relationship to domestic labour is that we're taught that domestic labour is how women prove they are women, so we take up that role aggressively as the only means of feminine expression we're permitted, but without ever being rewarded with recognition as women. And everyone else around us gleefully accepts the way we overwork ourselves to the bone. Medical transition is completely out of the question for most of us, so you'll very commonly hear how we tried to completely starve ourselves during puberty to prevent our body from growing, the only bodily autonomy we can afford. And what little choice we do have for medical transition is basically doctors subjecting us to years of puberty blocker monotherapy, widely known to cause lifelong chronic health issues, just to prove that we're really actually trans. Then once we pass that trial they continue underdosing us anyway.

And through that whole process we're horribly aware of the way that society talks about us, how the entire landscape of entertainment treats us as a punchline, how the news playing everywhere calls for our erasure, how laws shift to delay your medical transition another year every year, how grown adults will write fantasies about hunting down and dismembering us, and will actually coordinate harassment and assault circles to target us, how the police & parents & teachers & any authorities won't do anything to protect us against that, instead preferring to enthusiastically call you by your deadname over your grave. They all want us dead. And so we play the part. We hide, we shrink ourselves, recluse into the corners of society to find solace. Dissociate from our already neglected bodies. Hope that a safety net will divine itself upon us by chance when we have no control over the forces dictating our lives. And kill ourselves if it never comes.